Martin Kettle in Washington
The United States has discovered a fashionable new writer, and his name is Norman Mailer. Mailer was on the front pages of the New York Times and USA Today last week. He has done a television interview with American breakfast television’s flagship show.
All this is because he has published a new anthology to mark his 75th birthday and the 50th anniversary of The Naked and the Dead, the novel with which the young Mailer sprang into the US’s consciousness after World War II.
But Mailer’s return is about more than anniversaries. To judge by the enthusiasm with which he is being rediscovered, it may also mark the return of Mailer’s values, and the reawakening of the social, political and personal passions that animated his greatest writing. Appropriately, Mailer’s new book is called The Time of our Time. If Mailer is back, then can the humour, humanism and fellowship which have fired him be far behind?
His publisher, Random House, threw a party for him at the top of the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan, with a guest list that reflected the writer’s omnivorous interests – Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, William Styron and Henry Kissinger were there, as was Jos Torres, the former world light-heavyweight champion in a sport of which Mailer has been the peerless modern chronicler.
On the breakfast interview, Mailer opined: “Women are going to take over the world.” He predicted that within 100 years there would be only 100 men left, who would act as “semen slaves” to a planet of women.
At 75, Mailer is still in fighting form, though he admitted that “I can’t go out all night any more and write the next day. When you get older, every time you drop something it’s a drama. What bones are you going to use to pick it up?”
Mailer is still a close watcher of politics. In a recent piece he wrote of Bill Clinton: “The real horror is that if he had had the courage over these years to fight real wars for others less powerful than himself, then he could have been a great president.”